True Heart Susie
Director: D.W. Griffith
Year Released: 1919
Rating: 2.5
An "average-looking" homebody (Lillian Gish) sells her cow to pay for a 'friend's' college tuition - mistakenly thinking they're in a relationship and he's her one true love - only to have him return from school and marry some floozie. It's (yet another) one of Griffith's (emotionally) battered woman movies with Gish's character unbearably tolerant of her would-be lover's ignorance - when the 'other woman' he marries sneaks out to a party, gets sick and dies (cosmic punishment for unfaithfulness), she all-too-willingly accepts him back. The message appears to be along the lines of: plain ladies, just wait for your true love to get done having flings with wild women and they'll come back and settle for you. Griffith: aesthetically marvelous, but some of his films' plots and underlying morals make me claw at my skin.
